Evaluating the Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Canada

Global biodiversity is declining due to habitat loss and protected areas provide an opportunity to prevent this. While governments create and manage most protected areas in the world, non-governmental organizations can also play a significant role in the acquisition and management of properties for the purpose of conserving biodiversity. We propose to measure the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s contribution to the protection of biodiversity in Canada. To do this, we will compare various measures of biodiversity and connectivity over different NCC land management types (purchased vs donated and fee simple vs conservation agreement). We will also compare these metrics among NCC properties and other protected areas in Canada (e.g. areas managed by government).

Faculty Supervisor:

Ryan Norris

Student:

Leonardo Custode

Partner:

Nature Conservancy Canada

Discipline:

Biology

Sector:

University:

University of Guelph

Program: